Free Theater Macabre by Kealan Patrick Burke Page A

ask if he had put something in Nick’s drink as a lark, some new drug maybe, but feared what it might do to him if, like the receptionist, his best friend started speaking in reverse.
    He wanted to run out into the street and see if anyone else had escaped the nightmare unscathed, but the possibility of what they might have become frightened him more, and he stayed where he was.
    In the end, after bracing his nerves with a sizable glass of whiskey, he decided on the only coarse of action available to him.
    He would sleep. For he had decided that the only viable, the only rational explanation for what had happened was that it hadn’t happened at all. He was dreaming, and while he’d never experienced such a vivid dream before, he was willing to accept this as an introduction to a whole other phenomenon. One that began and ended in his brain.
    Once the decision was made, he began to feel better. His trembling subsided – a development he reasoned was due to the fact that he had uncovered his own mind’s nefarious scheme and, with the villain exposed, the charade could be abandoned.
    Nick stood, and slowly made his way up the stairs at the wrong side of the house, using his hand on the wrong-sided banister to steady himself. And then he was in his bedroom, colored by the wrong angle of sunlight through the equally wrong window.
    He collapsed on the bed and after a few moments of feverish mumbling, he slept.
     
     
    *
     
     
    He drifted awake and lay still and staring.
    Confusion spun through him as he tried to focus on where he was and soon he remembered the dream, though he was not yet ready to let go of the apprehension it had instilled in him.
    The light had faded, tinged with red and for a moment he almost moaned, sure the queer reality he’d imagined hadn’t been his imagination at all, but a curse he would have to endure until he died. But then he registered the dappling light on the ceiling, and realized what he was seeing were no more than echoes of dusk as night encroached on the world.
    He sighed and rubbed a hand over his face.
    There came a slow, unsteady clacking sound. Nick flinched, his fingers gripping the covers tightly.
    The stairs. Someone on the stairs.
    He let his body relax and felt a new wave of exhaustion overcome him. He was in no hurry to leap from the bed and check to ensure that everything was in its rightful place, that he hadn’t awoken again into a world that had looked inside itself and been caught looking.
    Carla’s smile would be enough.
    The clacking drew closer, the familiar sound of heels on wooden steps, and then they paused outside the bedroom door, as they always did when she was trying to be quiet, trying not to rouse him. Such consideration always tickled him. She was polite enough to try to avoid waking him, but when he did wake, she would immediately chastise him for sleeping the day away.
    Take a look at yourself in the mirror sometime , she’d say. A good look…
    Nick thought it might be some time before he’d be able to accede to that particular wish without trembling.
    The door to the bedroom swung open.
    “Hey babe,” he said, sitting up and squinting to make out her shadowy form in the doorway.
    And froze.
    She was facing away from him.
    “Carla?”
    “Kin,” she replied, as she took a back-step into the room.
     
     
     
     
     
     
    The Tradition
     
     
     
    You're alone .
    She awoke, slowly, blinking to rid the darkness from her eyes, but it refused to leave. Instead it separated like a tattered curtain through which hung only feeble strains of light. It was dark, much darker than she liked, and it had been that way for as long as she’d been here, sitting on the stairs, waiting with the smell of mildew and dust in her nose.
    What are you waiting for, Evelyn?
    She frowned at the question, knowing the answer was there, hiding perhaps between those gently shifting veils of lighter dark, but it would not come. There was a purpose for her presence here. Of